


After Pennsylvania

by BeaArthurPendragon



Category: Daredevil (TV)
Genre: Abusive Priest, Bad Touch, Catholic School, Child Abuse, Gets What's Coming To Him, Other, Pedophilia, Roman Catholicism, Sexual Abuse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-21
Updated: 2018-08-21
Packaged: 2019-06-30 10:01:12
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,088
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15749421
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BeaArthurPendragon/pseuds/BeaArthurPendragon
Summary: Matt Murdock discovers the whereabouts of a bad priest from his past. Demons are confronted. Justice is served, insofar as it can be, but healing is hard to find.Background: I have been heartbroken ever since thegrand jury in Pennsylvania released its reportdetailing the horrific extent of Catholici church sexual abuse that transpired in that state over the past 70 years. (I'm not going to summarize it here because it would require too many trigger warnings to list--please follow the link if you want more information.)I threw this fic together over the weekend as a way to process it.Trigger warnings: I know this is a sensitive topic. Please bail now if you're triggered by child abuse, sexual abuse, and generally icky bad touch.





	After Pennsylvania

He heard the father’s step on the landing before he opened the office door.

“Father Lantom,” he heard Karen say in a surprised voice in the next room. “What brings you here? Business or pleasure?”

“Matthew asked me to stop by at the end of the day,” Lantom replied. The lie came so easily Matt briefly wondered if they didn’t actually have an appointment.

“Matt!” Karen called through the wall. (They were thin.) “Stop making appointments without telling me!”

“Sorry,” Matt said, pulling his office open. “Father, come in, sit.” And to Karen, “You don’t need to wait for us. I’ll lock up.”

“I wasn’t planning to,” she said archly. “See you tomorrow.”

When she was gone, Matt turned back to Lantom. “Are you here for what I think you are?”

“I take it you saw the newspaper this morning?”

Matt nodded. A thousand children abused by priests in Pennsylvania over the course of 70 years, some with a degree of sadism he’d only encountered among the most depraved child traffickers, and almost none that could be prosecuted anymore because the statute of limitations had run out. He had spent most of the afternoon reading the grand jury report—or trying to—though he kept having to take his fingers off his braille display and rub his hands clean as the horrors piled on.

“I almost left the priesthood, once, you know. After Boston,” Lantom said. He looked at the chair Matt had waved him toward but did not sit. “I was almost 60—I could have retired. I wondered how I could continue to serve God through such a corrupted church.”

“What made you stay?” Matt said.

“You,” Lantom said. “And the other children at St. Agnes, but mostly you. I realized it was only way I could protect you.”

“Father Phil?” Matt asked softly, shuddering still at the memory of the gym teacher’s hand, lingering a little too long on his shoulder, a little too close to the back of his neck. Father Phil had left St. Agnes’ abruptly long before the Boston revelation. The students were never told why, but not one of them doubted that it was the same reason Jacob Martinelli, one year ahead of Matt, had also withdrawn.

“Did he ever—”

“Molest me? No. But he—” Matt shook his head. “Was not someone I wanted to be alone in a room with.”

Lantom rubbed his mouth and chin and shook his head. “I’m sorry, Matthew.”

“Is that why he left in the middle of the year? Is that why Jacob left?”

“I can’t discuss that, Matthew. You know that.”

“Where did Father Phil go?”

“Between you and me? His victim didn’t press charges, so we sent him to a counseling center, for a year. Then Erie, after he was cured.”

“Cured?”

Lantom shrugged. “I’m not a psychiatrist, Matthew. I believed them.”

“I didn’t see his name in the report.”

“My understanding is that St. Mary’s served a largely immigrant population,” Lantom said. “Not all of whom were here legally.”

“You think he preyed on kids whose families would be too afraid to go to the police?”

“All I know is that he left the priesthood not long after Boston,” Lantom said. “Whether it was because he hoped to escape the closer scrutiny that he knew was coming, or whether it was a result of that scrutiny, I don’t know.”

“How did you know he left, then?”

“I ran into him at Metro General last week. I was visiting a couple of parishioners and he was visiting his sister, who’d broken her hip,” Lantom said. “He’d moved back to New York after he was laicized to be near her. She and her husband own an apartment building in Queens. He’s the super.”

“Are there children in the building?”

“I don’t know, but I assume so.”

“Father, I’m going to ask you a question that can’t leave this room,” Matt said.

“Of course.”

“Are you asking for my help as a lawyer, or—”

“Let’s just say I’m not particularly concerned with the instrument with which you think justice is best pursued in this case.”

After Lantom left, Matt began to pace. He hadn’t allowed himself to think about Father Phil in 15 years, not since he’d been transferred away from St. Agnes, but everything came roaring back now, as fresh as it had felt when he was eleven. The hand that insisted on holding his whenever he guided Matt around the school gym’s weight room, though Matt was tall enough at eleven to hold an adult’s elbow. The hand that rested lightly on the curve of his lower back as he did push-ups to remind him to keep his butt down. The hands that were so large, they could almost completely span Matt’s hips as he learned to do pull-ups. It was the only way he could show Matt proper form, he said. And Matt had believed him.

Disgust, terror, anger, shame—they were all fighting like wolves just beneath his ribs, crowding the breath from his lungs and the blood from his heart, leaving him choking and freezing and shivering despite the August heat.

 _Work the case, Murdock_ , he told himself, once his mind was able to relocate its capacity for language.

When he trusted himself to speak aloud again, he dialed his phone.

“Hey,” he said. “I got a case for you.”

“Sure,” Jessica said. “Who’s the client?”

“Me.”

* * *

 The next night, a little after two in the morning, Matt made his way to the address Jessica had found for Phillip Dubois. It was a small, five-story walkup in Astoria, 15 apartments plus a garden-level super’s residence buried halfway beneath the sidewalk. Appropriate, Matt thought.

He wasn’t entirely sure why he’d come. The whole building was asleep—he paused by every window as he made his way down the fire escape and listened to the soft symphony of snores and slow breaths. There were children in the building, he realized, and though he knew that would almost certainly have been the case, the knowledge squeezed his heart like a fist. He only hoped they were all girls, and therefore safe from his predations.

Finally he dropped down into the narrow alley—little more than an airshaft, Matt could extend his arms in either direction and touch both buildings at once. A line of barred, half-height windows ran at street level along Father Phil’s building; two had been fitted with window air conditioners. This was his apartment, according to Jessica.

Father Phil’s snoring made it all too easy for Matt to locate one of the bedroom windows. He knelt next to it, searching for some clue in the catch and choke of his breath that could allow Matt to definitively identify him after all these years.

But there wasn’t. Father Phil had come to St. Agnes at the beginning of Matt’s sixth-grade year; Matt had only been blind for about a year and a half and he had not yet refined his powers well enough to pick out small physical details like facial features. As a result, Father Phil was little more than a large, looming presence with hands as strong as Matt’s dad’s. After 15 years, Matt wasn’t sure he would even be able to recognize his voice—but he would be able to recognize that thick Maine accent anywhere.

 _C’mon, ladies, put some muscle into it! If I could get up at 4 a.m. to harvest potatoes in the freezing cold before school, you can run five more laps!_

_Five more sit-ups._

_Five more pushups, his hand on Matt’s back to check his form, his thumb almost, just barely, grazing the curve of his bottom._

_Five moah jumping jahcks._

Matt said a little prayer of thanks for the security bars, because he wasn’t sure he could have trusted himself not to break in and beat Father Phil to a pulp in his bed.

Instead, he walked to the end of the alley, vomited, and made his way home.

* * *

He stayed away from Queens after that. Instead, he had Jessica follow him. It was a better plan, anyway—Matt still had clients of his own to take care of and Jessica could surveil him during the day—but mostly it was because it was the only way Matt could keep himself from tanking his own case with a premature confrontation.

Finally, two Fridays later, Jessica showed up at Matt’s office with a memory stick full of photos and her report.

“Congratulations, Matt, you’ve found the world’s most boring pedophile,” she said, pushing the memory stick across the desk. “No lovers, no friends, just the sister. And he’s a real pious son of a bitch.”

Despite his sins, Father Phil had not, apparently, lost his faith—he attended Mass daily, usually at noon unless some building emergency required his attention. Nor, at 59, had he yet lost his taste for physical culture. He went to the YMCA every evening except Sunday, where he favored punishing 90-minute workouts that often left him shaking and red-faced.

Phillip Dubois, it turned out, was much smaller than he’d seemed to Matt. Maybe five nine, and no more than a buck-sixty—though that was all muscle, if his arms were any indication about the rest of him.

Still, the smallness of the man began to make Matt wonder if they were tracking the wrong person.

“Did you hear him speak at all?” Matt asked. “He had a strong New England accent.”

“Not yet,” Jessica said. She dug her phone out of her bag, dialed a number, turned on the speaker and placed it on the desk between them.

“Phil Dubois here.”

_Here, Matty, let’s get you up on that bar._

_Hee-yuh, Metty, le’s git yuh up awn thaht bah._

Bile burned in his throat and he could not help but try to wipe away the memory of those hands around his hips, thumbs digging in under his hipbones, fingers cupping his bottom, boosting him up to the pull-up bar that all the sighted kids were allowed to jump to grab. Finally sick of it, Matt had kneed him the chin and shouted, “I can do it myself!” in front of the entire class.

He earned a week’s detention for striking a teacher and got three jammed fingers and a deep bone bruise on his thumb before he figured out how to find the bar in the air once he was allowed back in class, but Father Phil never helped him again.

Because even after all those months, that’s all he thought it was. Help he didn’t want, help reminding him that he couldn’t do all the things other kids could do, help that made him feel small and weak when he knew he wasn’t.

He was only vaguely aware that Jessica was arranging to see a vacant apartment in the building, that there was an open house tomorrow at two, that she would so totally be there.

“Okay, Miss Reynolds,” Father Phil said. “See you tomorrow. God bless.”

_Gwad bless._

* * *

New York was flaunting its soupiest, swampiest August self, so hot they began to sweat the minute they emerged from the subway, so humid it was almost hard to breathe.

“Give me your cane,” Jessica said. “We can’t take any chances. Sunglasses too.”

“Jess, I can’t pretend to be sighted,” Matt said. “My eyes don’t track.”

“Nobody’s going to be gazing into your eyes, Matt,” Jessica said, still holding her bag open for him. “Besides, he’s a lot more likely to recognize you with the cane than without it.”

He reluctantly folded his cane and dropped it into the bag, followed by the sunglasses, pulling his Yankees cap further down in a mostly-futile attempt to relieve his feeling of overexposure. He’d gone out in civilian clothes without the cane and glasses before, but only at night, and only with a hoodie to keep most of his face in shadow. The thought of coming face to face with Father Phil without even sunglasses to hide behind was almost intolerable.

But there was little anyone could afford to hide behind in this heat. He was down to shorts and a t-shirt, while Jess was in an uncharacteristically girly spaghetti-strap sundress, her hair piled in a fashionable bun on the top of her head. He’d skipped his shave this morning, but he doubted the one-day scruff was enough to disguise him. The Yankees hat was all the protection he was going to get.

“Ready to go find our forever home, honey?” Jessica asked in the same sorority girl accent she’d used with Father Phil, catching his hand in hers and swinging it playfully. Even her posture changed, straighter and perkier, mobile in the hips and shoulders, her head cocked in a selfie-ready tilt.

“Ready to get it over with,” Matt said gruffly. He couldn’t explain his fear—in the grand scheme of things, what had happened to him was inappropriate but likely not even criminal, and in any case, he knew Father Phil couldn’t hurt him now. But he couldn’t seem to make the eleven-year-old in him understand.

“I know,” Jessica said, squeezing his hand. “Soon.”

To take his mind off the errand, he concentrated on the rare pleasure of strolling outside unassisted, the way he would be doing today if he hadn’t crossed 10th Avenue at that exact moment that drizzly April day 18 years ago, if that Roxxon truck had not run the light and not skidded crosswise through the intersection on that rain-slick street, if those chemical barrels had not been improperly sealed. The way he would be doing if he hadn’t been a blind kid who needed Father Phil’s help in gym class.

Matt practiced looking at things as they walked. Jessica would point something out, and he would try to turn his face as convincingly as he could toward the object in question. He had only middling success; his instinct was always to tilt his face a little too low in order to optimize the position of his ears, and now he was overcorrecting and looking too high. But sometimes he could manage a somewhat abstracted gaze that someone who wasn’t paying very close attention might mistake for looking. It would, he realized as they approached Father Phil’s block, have to do.

“We’re here,” Jessica said unnecessarily; the front door was propped open and there were balloons tied to the stoop rail. There was steady two-way traffic in and out of the building; a two-bedroom apartment for less than two grand was guaranteed to draw a crowd.

A ten-year-old boy with a soccer ball was just leaving as they approached, and any reservation Matt had had about going inside vaporized.

The mission was no longer himself, Matt knew. It was that boy. He had to keep him safe.

The apartment was on the third floor, and it was so crowded with house-hunters that they managed to make a full circuit of the place before they came across Father Phil, who had somehow materialized in the kitchen they’d passed through not ninety seconds before.

“Are you Mr. Dubois?” Jessica asked, sorority girl persona firmly in place. “I’m Amy Reynolds. We spoke on the phone last night?”

“Oh, right,” Father Phil said, though his heartbeat told Matt that he had no recollection of the conversation. Given the number of people milling through the apartment at the moment, he’d probably fielded a couple dozen of identical calls in the past day. He held out a sheet of paper from the sheaf he was holding in his hand. “Did you want an application?”

“Oh, definitely,” Jessica said taking it, looking back at Matt. “It’s perfect, right, honey?”

“If it’s perfect for you, it’s perfect for me,” Matt said, avoiding any possibility of a handshake by snaking his right arm around her waist and turning his face toward her with a smile, trying desperately to keep his heart from clawing its way up his throat. Father Phil even smelled the same – Irish Spring soap, Old Spice aftershave, and Ben Gay on his sore muscles. It took every ounce of Matt’s core strength to keep from shuddering.

“That’s a smart man you have there,” Father Phil said approvingly. _A smaht myan ya hahve theyah._

“I know, right?” Jessica said brightly. “Are you married?”

“Oh, no,” Father Phil said. “Between you and me, I wasn’t so smart.”

Jessica laughed and Matt tried not to punch his face into the back of his skull.

“You from Boston?” Matt asked, as much to give himself something else to think about as it was to make doubly sure this was the same man. “Your accent, I mean.”

Father Phil laughed.  “No, kid. Lewiston, Maine. Where are you from?”

“We’re moving here from Ronkonkoma, Long Island,” Jessica said quickly. “I’m a freelance food photographer and Brian’s a graphic designer. He just got a great new job at Travel and Leisure.”

“Well, good for you,” Father Phil said distractedly, already turning to the next couple angling for an application. “Get that back to me by the end of the day, okay?”

Jessica crammed the application into her bag and they weaved through the crowd toward the stairwell. In their initial circuit around the space, Jessica had quickly and deftly loosened the screws holding the security latch on the window that gave onto the fire escape, then pushed the screws back into the wood so they lay flush. A gentle pull of the sash tonight was all it would take for them to be able to slip in.

But they weren’t quite done. Instead of leaving the building, they followed the stairs down to the basement—ostensibly to look for a laundry room, if anyone asked. Nobody did.

There was, as they already knew, no laundry room downstairs. To the left of the landing was a work area enclosed by a steel cage—a table saw, a workbench, stacks of paint cans and tarps, an enormous pegboard hung with hand tools, stacks of lumber and spare doors and strips of molding, a large metal storage locker, and jars of screws and nails organized by size on a shelf running the length of the space.

To the right was Father Phil’s apartment. There was nothing about the door to suggest his predilections within—there was just a door knob and deadbolt, like every other apartment in the building, though this door was steel while the upstairs doors were wood. Well, that wouldn’t be unusual for a ground-floor apartment.

Matt couldn’t hear the low electric buzz of an alarm system, but he quickly picked the lock to make sure. Better to find out now, when they could blend in with the crowd on their way out, than tonight.

The locks gave easily and, blessedly, silently. Matt pushed the door open just enough to test the hinges for squeaks, then reached in and reset the locks before pulling it shut. There would be time enough to search the place tonight.

As they came upstairs, they met the young boy with the soccer ball who had held the door open for them on their way in.

“Hey, kid,” Jessica said. “Do you live here? We’re looking at the apartment upstairs. Can I ask you a couple of questions?”

“Yeah,” the kid said cautiously. “I guess?”

“It’s okay,” she said quickly, kneeling down. “My name’s Amy. This is my boyfriend, Brian.”

Matt held up his hand in greeting. “Hey.”

“I’m Marco,” the boy said.

“Hi Marco,” Jessica said. “Do you like living here? Are the neighbors nice?”

The kid shrugged. “Sure, I guess. Mrs. Aronowitz makes me cookies.”

“Oh, that’s nice,” Jessica said. “And is Mr. Dubois a good super? Is he good about fixing things when they break?”

“I guess? He’s always fixing things in our apartment.”

“What kinds of things?” Matt asked.

“Um, I don’t know. He’s just always in there. I know he installed a new showerhead and replaced our bathroom sink and installed a ceiling fan when he fixed all our wiring a few months ago.”

“What was wrong with your wiring?” Matt asked. “That sounds dangerous.”

“I don’t know. He just said we needed new wires? He gave us all new lights, too.”

“Oh,” Jessica said. “That’s super nice of him, right?”

“Yeah, my mom liked it.”

“Well, good,” Jessica said. “Thank you so much, Marco. We just wanted to make sure this was a nice building, and it sounds like it is, right, Brian?”

“Definitely,” Matt said trying to keep his skin from crawling.

“Well, thanks for your time,” Jessica said, standing up. “I hope we get to be your neighbors.”

When they got outside, Jessica shot a look at Matt that he had no trouble reading.

“That was fucking weird, right?” she said unnecessarily. “Have you ever had a super that attentive in your life?”

“Nope.”

“Yeah.” Jess spat into the street. “We gotta catch this motherfucker.”

* * *

 They returned to Queens that evening dressed for business in dark pants and shirts – no armor needed for this mission – and slipped into the narrow alley to wait until they saw Father Phil leave for the gym, his duffel bag slung over his shoulder.

Matt followed Jessica up the fire escape behind the building. He didn’t love this plan—it was a hot night, and still plenty early enough for people to be sitting outside for some fresh air—but they couldn’t round up the tech they needed to circumvent the magnetic lock on the front door on such short notice.

As it turned out, it was too hot and muggy for even the most ardent fire-escape sitters. Heat thunder rumbled over the horizon as it had every night that week, promising rain that never came, and by the time they slipped into the empty third-floor apartment, they were both half-soaked with sweat.

They stepped cautiously out onto the landing, and once they determined nobody else was on the stairs, they swiftly and silently darted down to the ground floor.

The apartment door lock opened as easily as it had that afternoon, and now, finally, they stepped inside.

Phillip Dubois may no longer have been a priest, but he still largely lived like one. His basement apartment was small and spare, furnished with a secondhand sofa and coffee table, a small table with two wooden chairs, and an old television on a metal A/V cart that appeared to have been salvaged from a closed school. A stack of library books waited on the kitchen counter. A heavy bag hung in the corner. A pair of gloves and a jump rope hung from wall hooks next to it.

In the bedroom, there was a twin bed made simply with a single pillow, well-worn sheets and a rough wool blanket, a small wooden nightstand that held a lamp and a bible, a narrow closet hung neatly with nothing but khakis and button-up shirts, and a three-drawer chest for underwear, t-shirts, and socks. A pair of cheap slippers lay on the floor near the foot of the bed. A pair of paint-and-grease-spattered coveralls hung on a hook behind the door. There were blinds but no curtains. There was no rug. There was no mirror. A small crucifix hung above the bed.

Matt dropped to the floor and ran his arm under the bed. He found a large tackle box and drew it out.

It contained fishing flies.

“Jess, did you see a fishing pole anywhere?” Matt asked.

“Yeah, in the hall closet,” she said.

“Weird that he keeps these under his bed,” Matt mused. “Oh well.”

He pushed the box back under the bed, but flushed cold when it rattled against something metal. He stood back up and pulled the bed away from the wall, revealing a loose air vent in the floor.

“You’re not supposed to be here,” he mused, noting the radiator in the corner and the window air conditioner above the bed that would not be necessary if the apartment had central air. He knelt and pried the vent cover off, then gingerly reached down into the hole in the floor.

It was definitely not an air vent. Instead of ductwork, he found a shoebox triple-wrapped in three heavy-duty plastic yard bags and tied with coarse twine.

He placed the shoebox on the bedroom floor and sat cross-legged in front of it to open it.

It was filled almost to bursting with photographs.

“Jess,” Matt called softly. “I need you to look at this for me.”

She hurried into the room and sat next to him.

“Oh my God,” she said. “I know why he replaced the wiring.”

“Is it Marco?”

“In his bedroom. It looks like he’s installed a camera in the ceiling. Maybe in the light fixture.” She shuffled through the photos. “Oh God. And the bathroom. In the shower. Oh my God.”

“They’re all of him?”

“Oh, no. There’s other boys, too. Same deal, in their rooms, in the shower. Looks like other apartments here,” she said, sifting further down into box. “Oh, and not just this building. It looks like he has a camera mounted in a gym somewhere. A shower room. Could be that YMCA he goes to.” She selected a photo and looked at it more closely. “No, I think it’s a school. I can see part of a name tiled into the wall. And it’s all kids. Boys.”

“What school—can you tell?”

“Just a capital _S_ and a lowercase _t_ —then it cuts off,” she said. “Catholic, anyway.”

“Could be either St. Agnes or St. Mary’s,” Matt said. “Wait—are the kids mostly white, or is it more diverse?”

“Almost all white,” she said. “The school pictures are old, if that helps. They’ve all started to go a little yellow.”

 _St. Agnes, then._ “How old are the kids?”

“High school, middle school. No really little kids, thank God.”

 _Because children didn’t have to shower after gym class at St. Agnes until 5 th grade_, Matt remembered.

“And they’re—”

“Naked,” she said, wiping her eyes as she studied one of the photos. “Just showering, drying off. Some are horsing around. They have no idea.”

“Stop looking,” Matt said, pushing her away. “Just—stop.”

“It’s your school,” she said flatly. It was not a question.

“Yeah.”

“I know,” she said. She handed him the photograph she was holding. “It’s your class.”

Matt took the photo and placed it face-down on the floor, for once glad of his blindness. “I don’t want to know how you know that, but I suppose I have to ask.”

“Your birthmark,” she said.

His hand instinctively flew to the spot on the front of his thigh where an irregular baseball-sized splotch bloomed red and ever so slightly raised just above the hem of his boxer shorts.

“We could take the ones of you out, if you want,” she said. “There’s more than enough kids here to convict him.”

It was a tempting offer. He hadn’t known the photos existed until that moment; he could, theoretically, just walk away from it. Nobody but he, Jessica, and Father Phil would ever know it existed. Nobody but them would ever know he’d been used like that. If Jess destroyed the photos, it could stay secret forever.

But the time for secrets was over.

“Keep them in,” Matt said after a minute. “I’m not letting him get away with any of it.”

They replaced everything in Father Phil’s apartment, and as much as they wanted their night to end there, they knew it couldn’t. They needed something to bring to the police that could be plausibly explained, and they suspected that the something in question was back upstairs in the vacant apartment.

Now that they knew what to look for, it took no time at all. Without turning on the light, Jessica stood on the toilet and shone her penlight into the light fixture—hopefully blinding the camera she discovered there long enough for her to take a photo without her face being photographed in return. She checked the bedrooms as well and discovered one in the smaller of the two as well. She took a photo of this one as well.

Now the clock was running—unless he had suddenly started using night vision cameras, Father Phil wouldn’t know Matt and Jessica were the ones who had discovered them, but he would know _someone_ had.

They didn’t even wait to get back to Manhattan—once they were safely a block in the opposite direction of Father Phil’s likely route home, Jessica transferred the photos from her camera to her phone and emailed them through an anonymous burner account directly to Brett Mahoney at Manhattan’s 15th Precinct. Father Phil was outside his jurisdiction, but police were police—they knew he’d get them to the right place.

Then they found a pay phone—one of the half-dozen remaining in the borough—and Matt dialed the precinct, knowing Brett would answer.

“Check your email,” he said, in the low, hoarse voice he used as the Devil of Hell’s Kitchen. “And get the police to that address immediately.”

He hung up before Brett could respond.

Twenty minutes later, they heard the first siren.

* * *

 An hour later, they were sitting on Matt’s roof, splitting a bottle of scotch as they listened to the heat thunder booming to the west. A wet breeze promised actual rain, at long last, but not yet.

After a few silent minutes, Jessica cautiously touched his shoulder, but he immediately flinched away.

“Sorry,” he said.

“I get it,” she said. “It feels like it just happened all over again, when you find out like this. It’s like he got to hurt you twice.”

“Yeah,” Matt said, knowing the _he_ in question was Kilgrave, not Father Phil. But she wasn’t wrong. As the night ticked by, the weight of his discovery made his heart so heavy it felt as if gravity threatened to tear it out of his chest. There was no language to describe the violation he felt; he wanted to bathe in bleach to wash it away.

“Though it could have been a lot worse,” Matt added. “There was a boy at my school—"

“You’d never say that to your own kid,” Jessica said. “Don’t say it about yourself, either.”

“I have to.” Matt took a long pull from the bottle. “It’s the only way I can keep from breaking into Central Booking and killing him.”

“I wish I could tell you that’s not the answer, but.”

“Did it help?”

“Killing Kilgrave?”

“Yeah.”

“I didn’t have a choice. He was going to kill Trish,” she said. “But yeah, it felt good to hurt him. And it feels really fucking good to know he’ll never hurt anyone else again.”

“I want him to hurt, Jessica,” Matt said.

“If it makes you feel better, a week in Gen Pop at Riker’s will probably take care of that for you. A pedophile priest is not going to stay intact there for very long.”

Matt gave a joyless laugh and took another long pull from the bottle.

“Give me that,” Jessica said, prying the bottle out of his hand and taking a drink. “The thing about this is, you’ll never really be whole again. But you have a chance to stitch yourself up a lot better than I did.” She drained the bottle and stood. “Don’t fuck it up.”

The thunder cracked again, much closer now, and the breeze picked up. As Matt stood, the first drops of rain begin to fall.

“Storm’s here,” he said.

“Finally,” she said.

* * *

 There was no trial. Father Phil plead guilty to 189 counts of child pornography—one for every photo of every child—and a whole host of other sexual abuse charges besides. His crimes against Marco, it turned out, went far beyond voyeurism. At least three new victims in Erie were also identified. He would never be a free man again.

Even so, the judge invited any victim who wished to give a statement at his sentencing hearing. Most chose not to, but a few did, including Jacob Martinelli, and including Matt.

“I wasn’t sure I was going to speak today,” he said. “Given what he did to others, I wasn’t sure I deserved to take up any of your time, or your care. That what happened to me wasn’t bad enough to count. But a friend of mine who’s been through this herself reminded me that if what happened to me happened to my own child, I would never for a moment say it didn’t matter. It mattered. What happened was not rape, but it was a violation all the same, and it’s important that you understand that. It’s important that you know it hurts. It’s important that you know I haven’t been able to sleep since I learned of this, that I haven’t wanted to be touched, that I haven’t been able to pray. I’m blind and I’m a Catholic, and touch and prayer are as necessary as air for me. And he stole both of those from me. Not forever, I hope, but I’m drowning without them right now.” Matt shrugged. “Usually I’m on the other side of this chair, asking the questions, asking the court to be merciful in the name of justice, but I don’t have that kind of grace right now. So sentence him however the law requires, but know that it will never be enough. Never.”

* * *

 Father Lantom caught up with him outside the courtroom afterward. “Walk with me for a while, Matthew?”

“Okay.”

Matt could not bring himself to take the priest’s arm and was eternally grateful that his powers allowed him to keep step with him without touching him. They left the courthouse and headed west down Chambers Street, ostensibly toward the subway, but mostly just to walk.

“You did a brave thing today, Matthew,” Lantom said.

“It’s not hard to do the right thing,” Matt said.

“If that were true, we’d both be out of a job.”

Matt gave a tight smile. “Perhaps.”

“Are you okay?”

“No,” Matt admitted. “But I will be.”

“You want to talk about it?”

“No,” Matt said. “I don’t think I ever want to talk about it again.”

“I suppose not,” Lantom said. “Though I can recommend a therapist if you change your mind.”

Matt waved the idea away. “How much did you know?”

“About Phillip specifically, or in general?”

“About all of it.”

Lantom shrugged. “You heard things, of course. Rumors. Stories from other parishes. Before the internet, you never got more than bits and pieces. After the internet, you didn’t know what to believe.”

“Until Father Phil.”

“I never once doubted Jacob, Matthew. I need you to know that. We found a photo in Phillip’s room,” Lantom said. “Just one, beneath his mattress. We never found the others. But it was enough.”

“Would you have believed him without the photo?” Matt asked.

“I believed him enough to search the room,” Lantom said. “You have every right to be angry with me, Matthew. I didn’t protect you. I didn’t protect any of you.”

“No, you didn’t.” There was no anger, now. Just fact. 

“I will regret that for the rest of my life,” Lantom said. “I don’t expect you to forgive me.”

“For what?” Matt asked flatly. “Not searching the school for hidden cameras? Not checking the banks for a safe-deposit box full of illicit photographs? He betrayed you, too.”

“It’s not my own absolution I care about, Matthew. There were so many opportunities I missed, so many times I could have been more diligent, listened to my gut, pushed back when something seemed off. And I didn’t.” Lantom shook his head. “Maybe there was nothing I could have done to prevent what happened to you or Jacob or any of the other boys. But if I hadn’t been so quick to believe he’d been cured, there were a lot of other children I could have protected.”

“You don’t know that,” Matt said. “They might have ignored you no matter how hard you pushed.”

“But at least I could say I did everything I could have,” Lantom said. “I can’t say that now.”

“He can’t hurt anyone else anymore,” Matt said. “If you hadn’t told me what you suspected—"

“Too little too late for Marco, I think,” Lantom said. "That's always going to be on me, Matthew.

“I hope he suffers in prison,” Matt said. “God help me, but I do.”

“You know what, Matthew? So do I.”

**Author's Note:**

> (Please note that this doesn't take place in the same timeline/universe as [His Heart is a Place of Safety](https://archiveofourown.org/works/15377127/chapters/35684037).) 
> 
> Feedback? I lurk a lot on Tumblr as [BeaArthurPendragon](https://beaarthurpendragon.tumblr.com/).


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